The Tide Is Turning! We Need Your Help! | Diane Ravitch's blog

The Tide Is Turning! We Need Your Help! | Diane Ravitch's blog

The Tide Is Turning! We Need Your Help!

NPE Action is helping allies fight for their public schools across the country!

We are turning the tide against privatization!

We need your help!

The Tide is Turning But We Need Your Help

The narrative is shifting.

As candidates jockey for position, public education issues are no longer relegated to soundbites. Major media outlets are reaching out to NPE Action to better understand why candidates are backing away from charters schools. Our NPE Action articles about the role of education policy in the 2020 election have run in The New York Daily News and The Progressive.

We need your support to continue to change the conversation and move our issues forward.

Donate Now!

A donation of $20 helps us update the 2020 Presidential Candidates Project. Reporters have used the report as a resource to track the candidates’ positions on our issues.

A donation of $50 helps NPE Action continue to endorse candidates who will fight for our issues at the federal, state and local levels.

A donation of $100 helps us produce reports like Hijacked by Billionaires: How the Super Rich Buy Elections to Undermine Our Public Schools. That report exposed how money floods into elections to subvert the democratic process and spread corporate education reform.

A donation of $250 or more will help us bring advocates from coast to coast together in Philadelphia for our 6th National Conference. We hope you’ll join us for that conference and that you’ll consider submitting a panel to share the work you are doing in yourcommunity to keep your public schools alive.

And a recurring monthly donation of any amount becomes the income we can depend on to issue Action Alerts when we need to let our legislators know where we stand.

Donate Now!

In her new book, Slaying Goliath, Diane has called us “the Resisters,” the volunteer army “fighting back to successfully keep alive their public schools.” 

We simply can’t continue this work without contributions from “resisters” like you. Please give what you can today.

The Tide Is Turning! We Need Your Help! | Diane Ravitch's blog

How to Be a Better Ally | Schott Foundation for Public Education

How to Be a Better Ally | Schott Foundation for Public Education

How to Be a Better Ally

Since its founding the Schott Foundation has worked to help build a broad-based movement to ensure all children have an opportunity to learn. Importantly, a movement led by the grassroots leaders in communities of color who are most impacted by educational inequities and other barriers to opportunity. It’s not arms-length philanthropy, but close working partnerships with our grantees and allies that undergirds all our work. Schott's Vice President of Programs & Advocacy, Edgar Villanueva, adds his insight in How To Be a Better Ally and Why It Matters.

More foundations are deepening their understanding of the racial disparities that exist in the U.S. and adapting their work to be more responsive to what communities need. It’s also important for individual donors to learn about these issues, as donors can address racial justice by becoming allies to communities of color.

Many people are only now beginning to understand how systemic discrimination contributed to the wealth divide in this country. According to Prosperity Now, approximately 70 percent of black and Latino households fall below the $68,000 wealth threshold needed for middle-class status, compared to 40 percent of white households. Without this economic foundation, many people of color continue to be locked out of opportunities across all facets of life, from education to employment.

“When you’re talking about generations of economic opportunity, we’re not starting out at the same place so you can’t really get to the same place,” said Leslie Boissiere, Vice President, External Affairs, Annie E. Casey Foundation.

Although philanthropy has tried to remedy large social problems with good intentions, it also perpetuated these disparities. For more than 70 years, the sector has mainly invested in large, white-led organizations and marginalized small organizations led by people of color, according to Edgar Villanueva, vice president of Programs and Policy at the Schott Foundation for Public Education, and author of Decolonizing Wealth: Indigenous Wisdom to Heal Divides and Restore Balance.

Despite these mistakes, philanthropy is still being embraced with the hope that we can all do better together.

Read more >

How to Be a Better Ally | Schott Foundation for Public Education

Cartoons on Social Media | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice

Cartoons on Social Media | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice

Cartoons on Social Media

Ever bump into someone while walking and staring at your smart phone screen? Perhaps, even texting while walking. Lots do in cities nowadays. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and on and on have seized youth and adults (not yet those of my age cohort, however). Cartoonists, as always, capture the phenomenon. Enjoy!

MORE CARTOONS: Cartoons on Social Media | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice

CA’s A3 Education Indictment: The Counts of Sean McManus et al. | deutsch29

CA’s A3 Education Indictment: The Counts of Sean McManus et al. | deutsch29

CA’s A3 Education Indictment: The Counts of Sean McManus et al.

In this post, I offer excerpts of the 67 counts detailed in the 235-page indictmentof Sean McManus, Jason Schrock, and nine others who used weaknesses in California’s charter school laws to construct a network of fraud and launder $50M in public funds into their own pockets over the course of years. These 11 individuals (and unidentified others) did so by opening multiple charter schools and using companies, both pre-existing and newly-created, to establish a complex system of self-dealing– with little to no education actually happening via those exploited, educational dollars.

McManus bio sketch for A3 Annual Conference

Courthouse News offers a summary of the fraud scheme and the resulting indictments in this May 29, 2019, article.

I wanted readers to be able to view some of the charges firsthand. I could not post all of them because of length. However, what I offer hear provides useful insight in how McManus’ et al. scheme operated.

Counts 1 and 4– Conspiracy to Commit a Crime

(Count 1) On or about and between January 1, 2016 and April 20, 2018, Sean Joesph McManus, Justin Kent Schmitt, Jason Alan Schrock, Nyla June Crider, Michelle Claudia Kalehua Kukahiko, and Kealii Troy Kukahiko did unlawfully conspire together and with another person or persons whose identity is unknown to commit the crime of Theft of Public Funds… Prodigy Athletes….

(Count 4) On or about and between January 1, 2016, and April 20, 2018,  CONTINUE READING: CA’s A3 Education Indictment: The Counts of Sean McManus et al. | deutsch29

A billionaire changes his mind about school reform and what kids really need — and Barack Obama has a surprising reaction - The Washington Post

A billionaire changes his mind about school reform and what kids really need — and Barack Obama has a surprising reaction - The Washington Post

A billionaire changes his mind about school reform and what kids really need — and Barack Obama has a surprising reaction

For years, many of the United States’ wealthiest people have poured money into school “reform” efforts that some predicted would lift generations of the poor out of poverty.

Now, one of those billionaires says he doesn’t believe it anymore. He is Nick Hanauer, a venture capitalist and entrepreneur who has been funding education initiatives for years.

This is what he says now:

“I woke up one day and realized that it is false to say that education is the principal way of distributing opportunity in this country,” he said in an interview. What will work, he said, is paying Americans a livable wage — and that is now his philanthropic focus.

And, perhaps surprisingly, his support for a $15-an-hour minimum wage has come to the attention of former president Barack Obama, who urged his Twitter followers to read a piece Hanauer wrote in the Atlantic titled “Better Schools Won’t Fix America." CONTINUE READING: A billionaire changes his mind about school reform and what kids really need — and Barack Obama has a surprising reaction - The Washington Post

Class Size Rally 2019 [VIDEO] | Class Size Matters

Class Size Rally 2019 [VIDEO] | Class Size Matters Class Size Rally 2019 [VIDEO] | A clearinghouse for information on class size & the proven benefits of smaller classes

Class Size Rally 2019 [VIDEO]

On Tuesday June 11 at noon, more than one hundred parents, students, advocates, elected officials and union members gathered on the steps of City Hall to urge the NYC Department of Education and the Mayor to allocate specific funding in next year’s budget towards reducing class size.

Below is a video of the rally. Thanks to Norm Scott for taping the whole rally!

Class Size Press Conf City Hall June 11 2019 from GEM/Education Notes on Vimeo.

Class Size Rally 2019 [VIDEO] | Class Size Matters Class Size Rally 2019 [VIDEO] | A clearinghouse for information on class size & the proven benefits of smaller classes

The Charter School Industry’s Dishonest Attack on Bernie Sanders | The Nation

The Charter School Industry’s Dishonest Attack on Bernie Sanders | The Nation

The Charter School Industry’s Dishonest Attack on Bernie Sanders
Arguing that charter schools offer unique opportunities for poor African American children isn’t borne out by the facts.

During the Reagan era, ultraconservative columnist James Kilpatrick, a notorious segregationist since the southern Massive Resistance campaign against the 1954 Brown decision, took up the right-wing attack on Social Security from a novel angle. He opposed the program as discriminatory against African Americans because black men were statistically less likely than whites to live long enough to receive the old-age benefits. That was likely the only time in his public life Kilpatrick expressed anything that might seem like sympathy for black Americans.

A decade or so later, many advocates of the welfare “reform” that ended the federal government’s 60-year commitment to provide income support for the indigent similarly couched their efforts in feigned concern to help poor black people break a supposedly distinctive “cycle of poverty.” Similar disingenuous tears have accompanied the federal government’s retreat since the 1990s from direct provision of affordable housing for the poor. Thus, a racist premise that there’s a special sort of black poverty became a way to spin cutting public benefits for poor people as a supposedly anti-racist, anti-poverty strategy.

Now, despite abundant evidence to the contrary, the charter-school industry and its advocates also make such claims, asserting that charters offer unique opportunities for poor African-American children. On those grounds, for example, The Washington Post recently attacked the Bernie Sanders campaign’s Thurgood Marshall Plan for Public Education, which, among other features, supports the NAACP’s call for a “moratorium on public funds for charter school expansion until a national audit has been conducted to determine the impact of charter growth in each state.” In a May 27 masthead editorial, the Post described charterization as a civil-rights issue, claiming that charter schools can remedy the “most enduring—and unforgivable—civil rights offense in our country today [which] is the consigning of so many poor, often minority children to CONTINUE READING:  The Charter School Industry’s Dishonest Attack on Bernie Sanders | The Nation

The Battle Between West Virginia Teachers and Republicans Is About to Get Ugly – VICE News

The Battle Between West Virginia Teachers and Republicans Is About to Get Ugly – VICE News

The Battle Between West Virginia Teachers and Republicans Is About to Get Ugly

West Virginia public school teachers and the state’s Republican legislators are once again on a collision course over charter schools. And things could get ugly.

On Monday, the House of Delegates advanced a sweeping education bill out of committee that would introduce charter schools into the state. The last time the GOP floated the introduction of charter schools in the state, in February, West Virginia teachers mobilized and went on strike, eventually stopping the bill in its tracks.

This time, however, West Virginia teachers are being hit from a few more directions in a fight that’s become about something much larger than pay raises: the future of public education in the state. Earlier this month, state senators passed a proposal that would not only introduce charter schools into the state but also specify that teachers who go on strike are breaking the law.

Although teacher strikes are already technically illegal in West Virginia, teachers get away with strikes because of their sheer numbers and broad public support for their cause. But the Senate’s proposal seeks to undercut such movements before they begin by adding specific measures to punish CONTINUE READING: The Battle Between West Virginia Teachers and Republicans Is About to Get Ugly – VICE News

Elizabeth Davis reelected as Washington Teachers’ Union leader - The Washington Post

Elizabeth Davis reelected as Washington Teachers’ Union leader - The Washington Post

Elizabeth Davis reelected as Washington Teachers’ Union leader

Elizabeth Davis was elected for a third term as president of the Washington Teachers’ Union. (Marvin Joseph/The Washington Post)

Elizabeth Davis was reelected as the Washington Teachers’ Union president Monday, beating out a crowded field to secure her third term as one of the most powerful labor leaders in the District.

To win the election, the incumbent and her slate topped former teachers union president Nathan Saunders, whom Davis ousted from the job in 2013.

Concha Johnson, chair of the union’s election committee, said the mail-in ballots were tallied Monday evening. She said the counts have not been finalized, so she could not reveal how many votes each of the six presidential candidates and their slates received.

[Contentious teachers union race draws attention to incumbent’s DUI]

But she said Davis won by a landslide, with Saunders finishing second.

The union election turned contentious when Saunders revealed on his campaign website that Davis had recently been charged with driving under the influence. Davis pleaded guilty in Prince George’s County Circuit Court and must complete traffic classes.

Davis said in an interview she was excited with the election results but disappointed with union-member turnout. According to Davis, about 15 percent of the more than 4,000 ballots sent out were returned.

“I do know that is largely due to teachers feeling beaten down and feeling that their voices don’t matter,” Davis said. “Whatever work I have done to get them to vote for me suggests that I am on the right track to CONTINUE READING: Elizabeth Davis reelected as Washington Teachers’ Union leader - The Washington Post

Top 10 Reasons Bernie Sanders’ Education Policies Are Light Years Ahead of Everyone Else’s | gadflyonthewallblog

Top 10 Reasons Bernie Sanders’ Education Policies Are Light Years Ahead of Everyone Else’s | gadflyonthewallblog

Top 10 Reasons Bernie Sanders’ Education Policies Are Light Years Ahead of Everyone Else’s

For most of my life, the United States has been neglecting its public school children – especially the black and brown ones.

Since the mid 1970s, instead of integrating our schools, we’ve been slowly resegregating them on the basis of race and social class.

Since the 1980s, instead of measuring academic success by the satisfaction of an individuals curiosity and authentic learning, we’ve been slowly redefining it to mean nothing but achievement on standardized tests.

And since the 1990s, instead of making sure our schools meet the needs of all students, we’ve been slowly allowing charter schools to infect our system of authentic public education so that business interests are education’s organizing principle.

But now, for the first time in at least 60 years, a mainstream political candidate running for President has had the courage to go another way.

And that person is Bernie Sanders.

We didn’t see this with Barack Obama. We didn’t see it with Bill Clinton. We certainly CONTINUE READING: Top 10 Reasons Bernie Sanders’ Education Policies Are Light Years Ahead of Everyone Else’s | gadflyonthewallblog

New charter rules slipped into budget bill :: K-12 Daily :: The Essential Resource for Superintendents and the Cabinet

New charter rules slipped into budget bill :: K-12 Daily :: The Essential Resource for Superintendents and the Cabinet

New charter rules slipped into budget bill

Calif.) Rather than risk a high-profile battle in open session, legislative leaders and Gov. Gavin Newsom have decided it is best to tuck some charter school reform measures inside a budget bill.

AB 75, the omnibus trailer bill covering education finance directives, would also provide authorizers of charter schools authority to include the fiscal health of the charter as part of its oversight role.

The bill also includes language that would explicitly prohibit charter schools from discouraging “a pupil from enrolling or seeking to enroll in the charter school for any reason, including, but not limited to, academic performance of the pupil.”

Finally, the bill also forbids charter schools from requesting “a pupil’s records or require a parent, guardian, or pupil to submit the pupil’s records to the charter school before enrollment.”

Lawmakers have left for another day a number of other controversial charter restrictions—including an outright cap on charter growth and a statewide moratorium on establishing new charters.

Placing more restrictions on charters and imposing additional accountability requirements has for many years split California’s Democratic Party. And while charter opponents—which generally includes Newsom—probably have the upper hand in Sacramento, moving stand-alone charter reform bills has proved problematic.

By placing at least some new charter mandates within the education trailer bill, a majority of Democrats almost certainly will have no choice but to fall in line and support the legislation.

Other highlights of the education budget package include:

• $300 million for full-day kindergarten facilities to be allocated over three years and to be used for CONTINUE READING: New charter rules slipped into budget bill :: K-12 Daily :: The Essential Resource for Superintendents and the Cabinet

Big Brother, Blockchain Babies, Coded Religion, and “Good” Behavior – Wrench in the Gears

Big Brother, Blockchain Babies, Coded Religion, and “Good” Behavior – Wrench in the Gears

Big Brother, Blockchain Babies, Coded Religion, and “Good” Behavior

I wrapped up my previous post (SEE BELOW) about the Alice.si blockchain social impact platform noting that digital identity is THE KEY element required to make speculative markets in human capital data function. The game of gambling on life outcomes requires:

1) unique personal identifiers

2) predictive analytics protocols to set the odds

3) constant monitoring of those receiving services, including inputs and outputs

4) fluid cross-border payment systems tied to real-time data flows, and

5) data aggregation and deal fulfillment platforms.

If you don’t have the first item, the unique identifier, the game cannot even start. That is why developing scalable digital identity systems is crucial. Ironically, much of the discussion we are having now around data privacy, including GDPR, is being used to advance the case for digital identity. Once adopted it will be a sea change. At that point each person will be transformed into a digitally-branded commodity available for speculative trade (based on social/reputation scoring) in the global marketplace. That is the reality of what is being built right before our eyes, and yet so few people see it for what it is.

Below are some of the sixty members of the Decentralized Identity CONTINUE READING:

Alice & Automated Poverty Management

At the end of my previous post I introduced Alice.si, an Ethereum Blockchain software platform investors developed to automate payments to “charitable” projects that prove “measurable impact.”

The platform employs a “pay for results” structure, an approach adopted by numerous governments including ones in the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada and Australia. After years of data-driven austerity, it is becoming more and more acceptable for public services to be outsourced to non-profit and faith-based partners. Reimbursement for services can then be tied to outcomes-based government contracts, an arrangement that has garnered support from both progressive and conservative quarters.

To get the data required to run their human capital, life-outcomes gambling enterprise, financiers intend to digitally engineer the lives of the CONTINUE READING: Alice & Automated Poverty Management

What About Alice? The United Way, Collective Impact & Libertarian “Charity” – Wrench in the Gears - https://wp.me/p7SU8W-1kK on @wordpressdotcom

Charter ‘authorizers’ come under greater scrutiny in California | EdSource

Charter ‘authorizers’ come under greater scrutiny in California | EdSource

Charter ‘authorizers’ come under greater scrutiny in California

As charter school conflicts intensify in California, increasing attention is being focused not only on the schools themselves but on the school boards and other entities that grant them permission to operate in the first place.

They’re called charter authorizers, and unlike many states, California has hundreds of them: 294 local school districts, 41 county offices of education, along with the State Board of Education.

In fact, California, with over 1300 charters schools, has more authorizers than any other state. That’s not only because of California’s size but because it has decentralized the way charter schools get approved to an extent unmatched by any other state.

Someone wishing to start a charter school, or to renew a charter, must apply to a local school district to get the green light to do so. If a petition is turned down by the district, applicants can appeal to county boards of education, and if they are denied there, they can go to the State Board of Education as a last resort.

An emerging question is whether California’s authorizers have the skills, capacity and guidance to adequately oversee the charter schools under their jurisdiction.

That question figured prominently in the deliberations of the California Charter School Policy Task Force convened by State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond at the request of that Gov. Gavin Newsom. The task force issued its recommendations earlier this month.

The 11-member task force representing all sides of the charter debate was able to CONTINUE READING: Charter ‘authorizers’ come under greater scrutiny in California | EdSource

Big Education Ape: Court ruling limits charter schools' expansions with satellite campuses outside their territory | Northern California Record -https://bigeducationape.blogspot.com/2016/11/court-ruling-limits-charter-schools.html

How Goldilocks Opened a Charter School That Nobody Wanted

Big Education Ape: Satellite charter schools under fire - The San Diego Union-Tribune - https://bigeducationape.blogspot.com/2016/10/satellite-charter-schools-under-fire.html

Big Education Ape: Charter challenges appellate ruling to state Supreme Court - The San Diego Union-Tribune - https://bigeducationape.blogspot.com/2016/11/charter-challenges-appellate-ruling-to.html

International Survey: U.S. Teachers Are Overworked, Feel Underappreciated | Education News | US News

International Survey: U.S. Teachers Are Overworked, Feel Underappreciated | Education News | US News

International Survey: U.S. Teachers Are Overworked, Feel Underappreciated
The problems are far worse in the U.S. than among educators in other countries.

TEACHERS IN THE U.S. work longer hours and spend more time during the school day teaching than teachers in other parts of the world. And while the majority are satisfied with their jobs, only a fraction believes American society values their profession.

The topline findings of the Teaching and Learning International Survey, an international study published Wednesday by the National Center for Education Statistics, showcase the grievances at the heart of the wave of educator unrest that's prompted strikes, protests and walkouts in nearly a dozen states and school districts across the U.S.

[

READ: 

Teacher Salaries Fell 4.5% Over the Last Decade ]

"They are working a lot of hours, relatively speaking," Peggy Carr, associate commissioner for assessment at NCES, the Department of Education's data arm, said. "They do spend a lot of hours teaching. I think we need to think about that and what that means. Teachers love their jobs all across the globe, but our teachers, not unlike teachers elsewhere, feel as though we don't value their profession. There's a message there I think we need to think about."

No other education system had teachers who reported teaching for more hours than U.S. teachers, who taught for an average of 28 hours each week. American teachers reported working for an average of 46 hours total each week, which was higher than or comparable to educators in all but two other countries.

According to the survey, 90 percent of U.S.teachers are satisfied with their jobs, but only 36 percent believe that American society values the teaching profession – a sentiment that's fueled the discontent among teachers that's been on public display since 2018.

While the rate of job satisfaction among U.S. teachers was mirrored in other countries, the perception of value varied more widely, with the percentage of teachers who "agreed" or "agreed a lot" that their society valued the teaching profession ranged from 5% in the Slovak Republic to 92% in Vietnam.

The survey also bolstered long-standing criticisms about gender stratification in leadership positions in K-12 schools, namely that the majority of teachers are women, while the majority CONTINUE READING: International Survey: U.S. Teachers Are Overworked, Feel Underappreciated | Education News | US News